MuSlate: One-Stop Platform for Indie Music Creators & Listeners

No matter what people say, the biggest problem for an artist is to get audience. This problem becomes the only thing for an independent musician when he has just started to distribute his work. Now marketing takes time and most of all, funds for an aggressive campaign. One cannot just create music and hope to get noticed out of nowhere, even if the song is exceptional. What keeps an artist going? Audience more than anything. So, to help artists get audience and empower their work, MuSlate came into being.

What is MuSlate?

Ideated by Rohit Goyal in late 2014, Muslate is a one-stop solution for Independent artists, and musicians. It provides Indie artists & its admirers a unified platform where they can Listen, Organize, Share & Promote their music. Rohit is a graduate from NIT Kurukshetra and holds a bachelor’s degree in Electronics & Communication Engineering. He has 5 US patents against his name along with more than a dozen of research papers, engineering awards, and defensive publications.

Rohit stated that with Muslate, artists can get their work distributed and promoted globally via our worldwide distribution network and can get the right exposure, events and business. It makes sure, that all they need to focus is on creating quality music and rest of the things will be taken care. It also let Listeners host their music library in cloud so they have access to it anytime, anywhere. It is solely built around the concept of enabling the budding artists to reach to the main organized stream & to enable the listeners to have access to their music on the go.

Team at MuSlate

MuSlate’s services can be dissected into three parts:

For Listeners: The platform provides free Indie Music for its users. Not only it let’s you listen to cool songs for free but also provides cloud space to let you manage your favourite tracks, playlists etc.

For Artists: They basically have two categories for this section. One, where growing musicians can showcase their work and distribute their content through the platform. Two, they have a section called ‘Artist Plus’ in which artists that have reached a certain level and have started producing their own compositions can get their content distributed worldwide through platforms like Gaana.com, Saavn, iTunes etc and earn royalties.

For Event Organisers: The company helps event organisers to promote their event on the platform. It also acts as a talent acquisition platform for these companies, where they can hire in-house musicians.

The company is also working on creating an algorithm which will act as a smart music feed. This function will only show relevant/liked songs to its users.

Monetisation & Traction

As the company is working in the content distribution sector, they charge a fee for providing these services to artists. This is a very basic fee in which the company distributes content worldwide. They charge 25% of the total revenue generated through that song, the rest 75% of the royalty earnings are given to these artists. This scheme goes for individual artists, if its a recording studio the royalty fee goes down to 20%. As the platform is showcasing artists, event organisers also keep an eye to hire them for events. Rohit said, “we charge 10-15% commission on every transaction that goes through. Be it a big artist who charges 3-5 lakh for an event or a growing one, who charges Rs 10,000-15,000.”

The company claims to have over 100,000 registered users, along with around 12,000 registered artists from across 30 countries, and is generating 1,50,00,000 streams per month. “We are also backed by NASSCOM’s 10K Startup Program and have won many prestigious awards like HOT 100 Award from Center of Recognition and Excellence, Coolest Startup Award, etc,” added Rohit.

Funding & Market

The company is currently being bootstrapped. They wanted to raise funding last year but then they had to change the complete website, introduce new features etc. So they decided to raise money once the product was well built and ready to be pitched. The company is looking to close a round of $200,000-$250,000 in a few months and are actively in touch with investors.

There’s no denying that there are too many players in this segment. What makes the music industry grow? Producers & Consumers, like any other. Producers are the music creators, while consumers are listeners, if a company is concentrating on just one problem it might be able to grow but not for long. The market needs far better solutions than uploading and showcase. Services like global marketing are required to target relevant people. Players like Soundcloud have already created a big impact. The question here is, can a new player in this industry make an impact on the market?